THE BLUE SEAT CHRONICLES · BOOK THREE
THE SEAT THAT CHANGED THE GAME
“A voice can begin in the quietest seat.”
Goodison Park has a new team to call it home.
For generations, the old ground belonged to Saturday afternoons, family traditions and Everton memories passed from one supporter to the next.
Now, as Everton Women begin their first full season at Goodison Park, another chapter is being written.
For Evie, it becomes a season of her own too.
From her seat in the stands, phone in hand, she begins documenting the matches, finding an audience - and slowly finding a voice she isn't always allowed to have away from football.
Through wins, defeats, new friendships and everything happening beyond the turnstiles, Goodison becomes more than somewhere Evie goes to watch football.
As the ground begins a new life, so does she.
THE STORY
A NEW HOME. A NEW SEASON.
Goodison has seen generations of Everton stories. Now another one is beginning.
For the first time, Everton Women are beginning a full season with Goodison Park as their permanent home.
For Evie, that makes this season feel different too.
From her seat in the stands, she starts documenting what she sees - the matches, the atmosphere, the players and the changing life of a ground that means so much to so many people.
What begins with a phone and a few videos slowly becomes something bigger.
An audience starts listening. New friendships form. And Evie begins discovering a confidence at Goodison that doesn't always come as easily away from it.
Through the highs and lows of a football season, The Seat That Changed the Game follows two stories unfolding together:
A famous old ground finding its next chapter.
And a young woman beginning to find hers.
Because sometimes a new home doesn't just change where the game is played. It changes the people watching it too.
IT’S NOT REALLY ABOUT FOOTBALL.
Although this time, there is quite a lot of it.
Football gives the story its season.
The matches. The players. The walk to Goodison. The growing crowds. The good days, the frustrating ones, and everything that happens between August and the final whistle of the season.
But Evie's story is happening away from the pitch too.
It's about finding somewhere you feel comfortable enough to be yourself.
Finding people who listen.
Finding the confidence to speak when you've spent too long wondering whether anyone wants to hear you.
And discovering that sometimes the place where you go to escape everything else can become the place where you finally start facing it.
Goodison gives Evie a seat.
What she does with it begins to change everything.
BEHIND THE BOOK
WHY I WROTE IT
Because the game belongs to everyone.
When Everton's men's team left Goodison Park, plenty of people talked about what the old ground had lost.
I was more interested in what it was gaining.
Everton Women making Goodison their permanent home meant new matchdays, new supporters and new memories being made in a place already full of them.
But there was another reason I wanted to write this book.
Because I'm tired of the bullshit.
The Joey Bartons. The manosphere nonsense. The blokes who seem personally offended by women talking about football, playing football or simply having an opinion about it.
And I'm even more tired of seeing young women take abuse online because of somebody else's insecurity.
Women who make football content and get comments about how they look instead of what they've said. Who are told to get back in the kitchen. Who are sexualised, patronised or expected to prove their football knowledge in a way men rarely are.
And somehow they're expected to laugh it off as banter.
Fuck that.
The game is for everyone.
That's part of why Evie exists.
She's finding her voice in football at the same time as discovering what can happen when you put that voice online. There are people who support her, people who listen - and people determined to make her feel like she doesn't belong.
I wanted those young women to see themselves in this story too.
Not as victims. Not as outsiders trying to get into somebody else's game.
As football supporters. As creators. As voices worth hearing. As people who already belong.
So yes, The Seat That Changed the Game is about Everton Women beginning their first full season at Goodison Park.
It's about a famous old ground beginning another chapter.
But it's also my own small FUCK YOU to the people who still think football belongs to them.
And something much more important to the women they target:
Don't let some insecure arsehole convince you to give up your seat.
— Adam
THE NEXT SEAT IS WAITING.
The third Blue Seat Chronicle is nearly here.
Goodison has a new chapter.
Everton Women have a new home.
And Evie is about to discover just how far one voice can travel when she finally decides to use it.
The Seat That Changed the Game is coming soon.
A story about football, belonging, finding your voice — and refusing to give up your seat to anyone who tells you that you shouldn't be there.
COMING SOON
Little girls walked ahead of her wearing shirts several sizes too big, names across their shoulders that would once have been absent from the backs of children's kits. Mothers carried flags. Fathers balanced coffee trays. An elderly man shuffled towards the turnstile with a blue-and-white scarf wrapped twice around his neck despite the mild September afternoon.
Goodison had spent generations teaching people how to inherit football. Now it was teaching itself how to pass it on differently.
Goodison was still Goodison. That was the first thing Evie thought when she saw it.
It shouldn't have surprised her.
Buildings didn't understand ownership. Concrete didn't know who had moved out and who had moved in. Turnstiles didn't care whether the people passing through them were going to watch men or women.
But something had changed.
Maybe it was because everyone knew.
This wasn't Everton Women borrowing Goodison anymore. This was home. Their home.
The old ground had been handed another life. Evie slowed as she approached, taking it in.
For every woman who's ever been told football isn't her place. It already is.
COMING SOON
PART OF THE BLUE SEAT CHRONICLES
Book One
The Seat Left Empty
Book Two
The Seats We Once Filled
Book Three
The Seat That Changed the Game
Three books. Three different journeys through football, people and the lives built around the game.